OpenSecrets.org Offers Improved Ideological Coding

Behind the scenes, researchers here at the Center have implemented several changes in how contributions to federal candidates get coded and classified into one of hundreds of different industries and special interest areas — changes that affect not only the 2010 election cycle, but all data going back to our earliest data in the 1990 election cycle.

Since corporations and other organizations are prohibited from making direct contributions to candidates from their treasuries, one must look at the contributions from people associated with the institution to gauge its political persuasion and how it might be trying to exert influence in Washington. And thanks to federal disclosure rules, political committees must report to the Federal Election Commission the name, address, employer and occupation of all individual donors who contribute more than $200 to them during any election cycle.

Of course, it’s impossible to know what motivates every donor to open their wallets for politicians. Not every contribution is made with the donor’s economic or professional interests in mind. Nor does every donor consider their employer’s interests when they make a contribution.

But the Center’s research over nearly 30 years shows enough of a correlation between individuals’ contributions and their employers’ political interests that the Center stands by this approach. You can read more about our methodology here.

Additionally, many individuals make political donations due to partisan allegiances and ideological reasons.

For years, the Center’s methodology related to ideological classifications has examined the relationship between individual contributors, ideological PACs and candidates in order to determine whether to count a particular donation as ideological.

This approach can be thought of as a three-legged stool — and to be classified as an ideological donation, all three legs of the stool were needed.

An example: Say Donor A contributed more than $200 to Ideological PAC B. And say that Donor A gave more than $200 to Political Candidate C. Then, say Ideological PAC B, or a PAC with a similar purpose, donated more than $200 to Political Candidate C.

In this case, Donor A’s contribution to Political Candidate C could be assigned the ideological code of Ideological PAC B rather than the economic code associated with Donor A’s employer and occupation information in FEC filings.

The decision as to whether to overwrite an “employer code” with the “ideological code” for Donor A also depends on other factors, such as the percentage of all money Donor A has given to ideological PACs.

However, an increasing number of political candidates are rejecting money from political action committees — including high-profile presidential candidates during the past decade such as President Barack Obama, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and former Vice President Al Gore — and with this “leg of the stool” missing, despite raising massive sums from numerous industries, these politicos would be missing from many of the lists of top beneficiaries of ideological money.

Now, if Donor A gives to both Ideological PAC B and to Presidential Candidate C, Donor A’s contribution to Presidential Candidate C will be assigned the ideological code of Ideological PAC B.

Furthermore, even when this three-legged stool relationship existed, the Center had been prioritizing many industries that have often been in the media limelight, such as those within the oil and gas industry, Hollywood or the tobacco industry.

No longer will those exceptions be made, although money from registered lobbyists will continue to be presented in the lobbying industry profile, regardless of any donations to ideological PACs.

All numbers attributed to a particular industry can be assumed to be conservative estimates. Tens of millions of dollars of contributions in each election cycle are not classified by industry at all — either because the original data is incomplete or too vague to categorize, or because of limitations on the Center’s ability to fully research the millions of individual contributions given over the years.

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